THE GERMAN RESTORATION
Lens, Sidney
The German Restoration By Sidney Lens Bonn IF GERMANY rearms, in response to American pressure, how dependable an ally will she be? I have been hunting for the answer to this question with...
...The class stratifications are somewhat less rigid, but the danger of reaction is equally great...
...Even more disturbing for long-run stability is the fact that the share of corporate income enjoyed by the workers in the form of wages and social security declined from 60 per cent in 1939 to 50 per cent in 1951...
...For the industrial classes rearmament now means the return of unchallenged power...
...only a rightist army is needed to give it the militaristic flavor...
...On that score he agreed fully with the results of labor union research...
...An analysis published by the U. S. High Commission last year showed that corporate profits in 1950, after depreciation and taxes, were 80 per cent above 1939—"the prewar year of highest profits...
...People dress better, and hotels charge and get fancy American prices...
...For social democracy and its unions it bears the spectre of militarism not only in the army but in society itself...
...Money that should have gone to the state in taxes stayed glued to the rich man's bank account and was converted by him into privately owned factories and fixed assets...
...Symptomatic of the progress is the housing record of Hamburg...
...When currency reform took place in 1948 everyone exchanged all his money for $10...
...It is easy to talk of the new democratic Germany with a certain haughty pride in Western achievement...
...Today they no longer have to share political power either with the Junkers or with the Nazi Gauleiter...
...What's more, he agreed with his union adversary that Russia posed no immediate military threat...
...Although much that is good has been achieved in the postwar years, Western policy-makers seem to have missed a signal opportunity to build a true democracy, and some of the more thoughtful sense it now...
...From 1948 to 1952 per capita consumption of fats has gone up from 9 kilos to 22, sugar from 19 to 25, eggs 2.5 to 7.5, and meat 19 to 38.3...
...An outspoken labor leader, Lens is the author of two books, "Left, Right and Center," and "The Counterfeit Revolution," and many magazine articles—in the Yale Review, the Harvard Business Review, The New Republic, the Bulletin of the Foreign Policy Association, and others...
...The white collar—and relatively unorganized—worker may not have made any gains, but union leaders concede that the lot of the industrial worker clearly has improved...
...Trade was what Germany needed, even if the path lay through rearmament...
...But the industrial class is secure and haughty...
...The general seemed most frank...
...They were aided by liberal amortization programs and tax laws...
...But—and this was novel—he felt that rearmament was necessary to maintain Germany's alliance with the West so that it could increase its trade...
...How rich the industrialists have grown is not fully known because a recent proposal by the Social Democrats to publish tax figures has been hooted by the reigning conservative coalition as a usurpation of private rights...
...How—asked the magazine— could the government cope with a general strike with only its present police force...
...And the contrast between two and a half years ago and today is far sharper than in Britain...
...Nothing speaks more eloquently of the type of Germany now being rebuilt than the fact that the power of the authoritarian industrialists has not only been restored but is greater in a way than it was before or during Hitler's regime...
...But production was almost half again higher than in 1936...
...But it has all the elements which make for reaction in the future...
...The issue of rearmament is obSIDNEY LENS is writing a series of special articles for The Progressive as he circles the globe on the hunt for factual data on world tensions...
...One half of its 520,000 dwellings were destroyed by bombing...
...But even the refugee camps clear out at the rate of five or ten per cent per year...
...Even the working class is better off...
...Where simple workers could get only $10 in new notes for their old Reichs-marks, the industrialists were favored by legal loopholes which enabled them to convert their shares mark for mark and sometimes two for one...
...A family we know, with nine persons, first lived in a boxcar after the war, then in two rooms, and two months ago moved to three rooms—still crowded, of course, but less so all the time...
...The government has restored the power of the rich at a rate unprecedented in world history...
...Armaments for defense purposes alone were not urgent...
...A publication named Neues Aben-land, less evasive than most, stated the issue in other terms...
...viously being studied from every angle by all parties not only on its military merits but as an attribute of power...
...The gulf between rich and poor proceeds at a fantastic rate...
...The direction is unmistakably to the extreme right...
...It is not fascist, it is not anti-Semitic, it is not totalitarian...
...The rich are building beautiful new homes (while hundreds of thousands of families are crowded five and six to a room), are driving $5,500 Mercedes which they charge to business expense, and eat tax-deductible meals in fine restaurants...
...These data show," according to the official U. S. report, "that no progress has been made in Western Germany towards a more healthy distribution of income between wage earners and those at the top of the income table...
...Thus leveling was reversed...
...Thousands of new apartments are rising on streets whose bomb wreckage and rubble have been cleared away...
...But exactly the opposite occurred...
...He often lives crowded in one room, but he is moving up the ladder...
...Ill This is one important face of the Germany of 1953 that our government is bent on rearming...
...What the bombs didn't achieve, the semi-valueless Reichsmark did...
...Instead of nationalizing heavy industry and channeling its productivity for the national welfare, the government, through the tax bonanza, gave the old moguls the money and said "you keep it for yourself...
...In the terminology of Left Catholics like Eugan Kogon, or the Social Democrats, "the restoration" is in progress—and in Germany that could mean tragedy...
...Wages have outstripped prices by about four per cent...
...This was the critical moment: intelligent leveling could have been continued by the state through directing investment, planning, distributing income equitably, and breaking the back of the corrupt industrial classes which sponsored Hitler...
...The three parties of the ruling coalition are collectively their captives...
...An old Wehrmacht general and a young unionist recently debated the issue of rearmament in Frankfurt...
...Compared to the static conditions in France, Germany seems like an atomic dynamo...
...Today one hundred thousand are restored or rebuilt...
...But developing beneath the surface, in somewhat different form, is at least part of the shape of the old Germany with its basic weaknesses...
...The phenomenal economic recovery of Germany since currency reform in 1948 has lulled the fears of many well-wishers on this subject...
...Certainly no European nation can equal the progress made these last two or three years by the Bonn republic...
...II It is possible to make a glowing report on Germany, especially by comparison with the past, and by ignoring the significance of long-run trends...
...The common man is still worse off than he was in prewar Hitler Germany, but not much...
...No one begrudges good living to any other person but in a nation so shattered as Germany the monies spent for movie mansions, plus hotels, dance halls, coffee houses, and private palaces could have been far better spent for homes for the millions who live in cold and crowded fire-traps...
...I left Germany with the unhappy conviction that the new, truncated Reich, for all its apparent progress in some fields, could become our Frankenstein monster unless present trends are reversed...
...We saw one family of twelve —a couple with ten children and the eleventh on the way—housed in two tiny rooms, without water, toilet, or bath...
...The wartime bombs leveled Germany to a common poverty...
...The investment of capital in industry took about 23 per cent of the total national product from 1948 to 1951...
...The Social-Democratic Party, the only effective opposition, has about one-third of the electorate behind it and the trade union movement, with six million members out of a working force of 14J/2 million, is growing in strength...
...The clash of luxury and poverty is apparent everywhere...
...Germany, it said, needed rearmament to protect it from the "totalitarianism" of the resurgent trade union movement...
...Guns, he conceded, would cut into butter...
...Many Germans and a growing number of Americans fear that the new army will be dominated by the same professional soldiers as in the past, and will support and be supported by the rejuvenated reactionary capitalists who imposed militarism and Hitlerism before...
...The Association- of German Soldiers, the Steelhelmets, the Kyfhaeuserbund, and other so-called veterans groups —some 600,000 strong—are growing in bluster...
...The streets are jammed with cars...
...The refugees who come from East Germany and live in camps for a while are of course in difficult straits...
...I have been hunting for the answer to this question with results that are far from reassuring...
Vol. 17 • March 1953 • No. 3
